games

There aren't many hobbyist game devs working on role-playing games (RPGs). For those who are, it's useful to think about what the different parts of an RPG are, and how they fit together.

I won't talk about plot or characters; this blog entry is strictly about gameplay. Getting gameplay right in an RPG is hard enough without the burden of writing and editing a plot and characters.

There are 5 elements to any RPG:

• Roles
• Enemies
• Skills
• Items
• Exploration

Read on for their explanations.

luaSDL is a library that can be loaded by Lua to make use of SDL. To get a fresh new luaSDL.dll that Lua 5.1 can load, read on!

Ingredients

• MinGW and MSYS
• SDL development libraries (the "mingw32" tarball)
• Lua 5.1.4 (Win32_dll8_lib)
• tolua++ (not "tolua"!)
• luaSDL

Read on to get a fresh new luaSDL.dll for you to load and use!

Quipkit is a work-in-progress (read: not even near finished) indie RPG dev kit. This blog entry describes how we might make an RPG using Quipkit.

• 1 Vague Game Description
• 2 Initial Design
  • 2.1. Game States
  • 2.2. Resources
  • 2.3. Tools
• 3 Revising the Design
• 4 Making the RPG (Finally!)
  • 4.1. Programming the Game States
  • 4.2. Organising Resources
    • 4.2.1. Resource Support Code
    • 4.2.2. Making Custom Tools
    • 4.2.3. Make the Resources
  • 4.3. Testing the Game
• 5 Summary: The Finished RPG
• 6 Conclusion

1. Vague Game Description

Most games start as vague ideas, and indie RPGs are no exception. Here's one for our hypothetical RPG:

You play a guy in a traditional fantasy RPG. You walk around a map of grass and water, and every so often you encounter a monster. You exchange blows with said monster in the battle system until either you or it dies. If you win, you gain experience. With enough experience, the guy can gain a level and grow in strength. This continues until the player chooses to exit.

It shall be dubbed... Island Dude.

How would be breathe life into this little RPG? Read on!

Caught this on Hacker News:

Gamasutra - Dirty Coding Tricks

Hacker News discussion

Nine real-world stories of the horrible hacks that games programmers had to use in order to meet their deadlines. Here's one from the comments on the page by Ken Demarest:

Back on Wing Commander 1 we were getting an exception from our EMM386 memory manager when we exited the game. We'd clear the screen and a single line would print out, something like "EMM386 Memory manager error. Blah blah blah." We had to ship ASAP. So I hex edited the error in the memory manager itself to read "Thank you for playing Wing Commander."

I haven't written here often, because it's stunningly difficult to write something worth reading; only more so when your thoughts are fleeting and your Internet access is sparse. However, just to affirm that I'm still alive and kicking, I'd like to share some stuff I've been up to and thinking about.

First is my new project: Tea. Tea is a simple 2D game development library for Ruby. It's made for the sort of grass-roots development that was popular with QBASIC back in its era. Tea is designed with simplicity in mind: 0 is better than 1, and 1 is better than 2, but at the same time, it won't avoid a valuable, convenient feature just because it can be built from other features. Graphics, input, sound and text are the pillars of Tea.

Tea is making slow but steady progress. Events have been blasted right through. Sound and text are waiting on graphics, and speaking of graphics, that has been a royal pain to deal with so far. Why? In the words of Joel Spolsky:

All non-trivial abstractions, to some degree, are leaky.

To demonstrate, I'll describe what I'm dealing with in the graphics subsystem of Tea. Tea is built largely on Ruby/SDL, which, surprise surprise, provides a Ruby-like flavouring to SDL.

Tetris HD, posted on IndieGames.com.

This must be seen to be believed.

Took me 17 minutes to get my first line, which itself took 1 minute to play its disappearing animation. Took me 52 minutes to lose the game by holding Enter, and 8 minutes to try to die on purpose.

GomTV Averatec-Intel Classic S2 Finals, Game 4

Watch the video, then read some of the comments. My favourite has to be this one:

King Bee [2009.02.09 14:42:51 | 152.7.49.200]

Ha ha! Puny humans! Finally, our superior bee race has taken over Korea. Why Korea? We need to eliminate the crazy intelligent starcraft players, for they are our only weakness. As you can tell, we have succeeded. All hail your new Bee overlords!

Watch the VOD and you'll understand. :)

Presenting... Tiny Cannon ML!

Move with arrows/WASD, shoot with Ctrl/Z/N, slow with Shift/X/M.

The Japanese make the best shmups.

Spelunky is described by its creator as "La-Mulana meets Nethack": a horribly addictive mix of unforgiving yet compelling platforming action. It's been covered by many other places, so all I'm going to say is that if you've got Windows, you want to download this right now.

So instead of reviewing the game, I'm going to tell you how to kill the shopkeepers.